Mabe Fratti Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos?

This is a remarkable piece of work from Guatemalan composer Mabe Fratti. Her fluid, cyclical cello arrangements, interwoven with brittle synths, featherlight percussion and painterly dabs of vocal melody, move at a stately pace through the warm, clean atmosphere of Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos?, graceful and reassuring. 

Created during a stay at an artist space near Mexico City, forcibly extended due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, much of the album is improvised, kernels of ideas developed from collaborations with fellow residents in the space instigated by the lack of much else to do. Not that you’d guess that anything was left to accident or serendipity – every note feels carefully-placed, each movement adding something important to the intricate web Fratti spins throughout. More accurate perhaps to say that the underlying spontaneity of many of the tracks here lends them a certain organic quality, the slow thaw of ‘Inicio Vínculo Final’ being a case in point: this is music that breathes.

The record’s title translates in English to Will We Be Able to Understand Each Other Now? Only time will tell, but if the connections that created music like this are anything to go by, we can be somewhat optimistic.